Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future

By Steven O. Roberts, Carmelle Bareket-Shavit, Forrest A Dollins, Peter Goldie, Elizabeth Mortenson. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2020

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Race plays an important role in how people think, develop, and behave. In the current article, we queried more than 26,000 empirical articles published between 1974 and 2018 in top-tier cognitive, developmental, and social psychology journals to document how often psychological research acknowledges this reality and to examine whether people who edit, write, and participate in the research are systematically connected. We note several findings. First, across the past five decades, psychological publications that highlight race have been rare, and although they have increased in developmental and social psychology, they have remained virtually nonexistent in cognitive psychology. Second, most publications have been edited by White editors, under which there have been significantly fewer publications that highlight race. Third, many of the publications that highlight race have been written by White authors who employed significantly fewer participants of color. In many cases, we document variation as a function of area and decade. We argue that systemic inequality exists within psychological research and that systemic changes are needed to ensure that psychological research benefits from diversity in editing, writing, and participation. To this end, and in the spirit of the field’s recent emphasis on metascience, we offer recommendations for journals and authors.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12beff531c56ee00f455e73555a4019652098ec1

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding psychology's resistance to intersectionality theory using a framework of epistemic exclusion and invisibility (2020, positive): “…research centers dominant topics and methods in the field (e.g., with increased venues and opportunities to publish their work and improved chances for securing grant funding) and punishes those who stray from the disciplinary center (Ginther et al., 2016; Hoppe et al., 2019; Roberts et al., 2020).”